DPM rocks. After years of stuffing around with backup, I found a Microsoft centric backup solution which I would trust, and ironically it's from Microsoft. The nice thing is that hitting the DPM homepage immediately gives you useful white papers on how to use the product, calculate sizing on backup solutions by product, etc. Stuff that's useful.

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/dpm/default.mspx

Now, something I have the luxury of being an MVP is: expressing my opinion and not being part of the marketing engine, and if you've been to my talks you know that I don't mind calling a spade a spade. And with that in mind, I do recommend a serious look at DPM. It's not a silver bullet, nor is it a cure all to everything that needs to be backed up, however it deserves a SERIOUS look, even if you have OTHER kinds of backup in place.

Living on a bandwidth and power challenged continent, I have new hope for backup, since using DPM, I can backup DPM to another DPM instance, but still restore the original item I backed up, no matter which DPM site it's coming from. Before I ramble on to much about how cool DPM is and the other stuff it can do for vitalization and the awesome Powershell support (yup, I managed to sneak a PowerShell reference in there), the long and the short of it is, why wouldn't you trust the guys who wrote SQL and Exchange to back them up?

While you're at it you may want to have a look at two useful blogs:

DPM Product Team Blog
DPM Product Manager's blog

And let me know what you think.

Nic